Rodriguez's 'Machete' tears it up as grindhouse fare

By all rights, even gore hounds should be perturbed by the sheer level of gut-churning mayhem, sexual depravity, tasteless slapstick humor - and gallons of blood - hurled at the screen in Robert Rodriguez's post-cheez-ee retro grindhouse spectacle, Machete.

Any college sophomore would find its less-than-subtle political message about the plight of Mexican immigrants in today's America so naive that it borders on the inane.

But Machete, which stars Danny Trejo as Machete, a machete-wielding former Mexican cop who wreaks havoc on the men who killed his family, is, simply put, lovely. It's hard to think of another film this summer that offers such sheer anarchic fun.

Trejo's adorable, perpetually infuriated, violent, misogynistic hard man flees to Texas after his fellow cops betray him. An illegal immigrant, he has to work as a day laborer and hide his awesome virility - he's a latter-day Mexican Kwai Chang Caine.

Rodriguez's Texas is an unfriendly, racist place dominated by the vicious Sen. McLaughlin (a delightfully nutty Robert De Niro), whose speeches about Mexican immigrants read as if they had been written in Berlin circa 1933.

When the corrupt senator's financial backer, Booth (Jeff Fahey), frames Machete for trying to assassinate the politician, the ex-cop is forced to take up his machete and seek vengeance. That includes bedding Booth's wife, June (Alicia Rachel Marek), and their daughter, April (a very naked Lindsay Lohan), in an incestuous threesome.

As luck would have it, he's also helped by two beautiful, derriere-kicking babes: Mexican-born revolutionary Shé (she's like the chick Ché), played by Michelle Rodriguez, and by-the-book federal agent Sartana, played by Jessica Alba.

A maniacal, over-the-top, daring, and insanely funny satire of the American cultus from Hollywood to Madison Avenue to Pennsylvania Avenue, Machete has all the nutrition a growing film geek could possibly need.

There's the copious blood and gore. There are weapons galore; the film features a firearms fetishist's arsenal, not to mention Machete's version of the ancestral samurai sword, the machete. There are the cartoonish arch-villains.

Last, but not least, there's the film's neo-sleez-y, postfeminist sex appeal. Lohan spends all five minutes of her screen time in the buff. Even Alba poses nude in a quickie shower scene. (And, of course, they all fall for Machete.)

But then there's more! Rodriguez thickens the stock with a meta-political, quasi-revolutionary message about America's recent populist penchant for xenophobia dressed up as concern for homeland security.

How could you not love such an aromatic PoMo bouillabaisse?

EndText